Former child star turned cautionary tale Amanda Bynes has resurfaced on the cover of Paper magazine looking happy, healthy and ready for a comeback.
Bynes broke through on Nickelodeon’s sketch comedy show ‘All That’ before scoring a series of her own at age 13 with ‘The Amanda Show.’ Her star continued to rise through the early 2000s with movie roles aplenty, including ‘What a Girl Wants,’ ‘She’s the Man’ and ‘Hairspray.’
But eventually, Bynes said in a new sit-down interview with Paper, self-image issues fuelled her burgeoning drug habit and led to her abandoning acting altogether.
The actress recounted a moment on the set of ‘Hall Pass,’ when, after seeing herself on a monitor, “literally tripping out and thinking my arm looked so fat because it was in the foreground or whatever and I remember rushing off set and thinking, ‘Oh, my god, I look so bad.’”
According to Bynes, it was a combination of image issues and Adderall abuse that resulted in her eventually leaving ‘Hall Pass.’ Shortly thereafter, she found herself in a similar situation while watching her performance in ‘Easy A.’
“I literally couldn’t stand my appearance in that movie, and I didn’t like my performance,” she said. “I was absolutely convinced I needed to stop acting after seeing it.”
Bynes is clear that any bad behaviour in previous years was spurred by drug use and not by psychological issues, saying that once she quit acting, her days were filled with little beyond getting high and self-destructing online.
“I’m really ashamed and embarrassed with the things I said. I can’t turn back time, but if I could, I would,” Bynes said. “And I’m so sorry to whoever I hurt and whoever I lied about because it truly eats away at me. It makes me feel so horrible and sick to my stomach and sad.
“Everything I worked my whole life to achieve, I kind of ruined it all through Twitter,” she said.
In the interview, Bynes also discusses her four years of sobriety and educational pursuit at Los Angeles’ Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, as well as her potential return to acting.
